• Africa has the human capital in order to achieve the adoption of AI, there needs to be a fundamental act of investing in education.
• There are less than a million software developers in the whole of Africa.
Image: DOUGLAS OKIDDY
Investors have been urged to invest in data transformation in order to match digital transformation across Africa.
AI Centre of Excellence founder John Kamara said that in order for Africa, and especially Kenya, to fully participate in the AI space, data transformation is key to digital transformation.
“Kenya is going through digital transformation and so is every African country but it is not intelligent at all,” he said.
“We are not thinking about the data. We take what we have on paper and transform it through automation but we are not thinking about the connected nature of the data.”
“We need to ask ourselves; what do we want to do with the data in the next five to ten years and how does it connect? How does agriculture connect to healthcare and how does healthcare relate to climate change?”
Kamara also said that if there is no thought about the development of data structures across the digital transformation value chain, Africa will be digitising infrastructure.
He added that five years from now, companies will have to spend more money figuring out what the data they have is saying because all that is being done now is writing reports and that’s it.
Kamara was speaking during the second edition of the AI for Leaders Summit that was held in Nairobi.
Hosted by AI Centre of Excellence, the workshop focused on investment in data science, building AI towards legacy businesses as well as investing in data and AI.
It also focused on discussions on the impact of AI on climate in the common markets and the impact of AI in environmental science and agriculture.
The Summit brought together corporate leaders both in the governmental and private sectors to sensitise them on the value of AI data in industries similar to theirs.
Kamara also noted that there is a lack of global talent in AI.
He said given that Africa has the human capital in order to achieve the adoption of AI, there needs to be a fundamental act of investing in education.
“There has to be an intentional will to change how Africa consumes and starts producing by allowing a lot of research and development to help the African youth to leverage AI to build infrastructure that can be used in the next centuries,” Kamara said.
“Investing in R&D in our universities is key because this is truly where AI engineers are formed. France bought and invested in AI in universities as of 1985 and they built R&D centres in their universities. ”
Kamara noted that there are less than a million software developers in the whole of Africa.
He also said that there is a transformation of software developers into AI engineers and data scientists which means that they will control a sizable form of the African market.
“The opportunity lies in the fact that we do have human capital intelligence which is impressive but the question remains; Based on capacity needs, how do we build qualitative human capital as a form of foreign direct investment (FDI) in most of our countries?” Kamara said.
“It’s all about data ownership and infrastructure as well as the use of data intelligence to restructure African economies.”
Kamara called on partnerships to build a sustainable ecosystem and governance within academia.
He also said there is a need for experts in different communities with experience who can transfer the knowledge to others.
“We need investors in the tech entrepreneur space to also be part of this ecosystem. We need to encourage that because if we look at how many AI companies are in Africa, in the last three years, Instadeep is the only African AI company that has scaled,” he said.